did not say how long he would give the FARC to declare a ceasefire, a condition it has rejected until now, but said he softened his stance at the request of Conservative Party leader Marta Lucia Ramirez in exchange for her support in the run-off vote campaign.

Call me a cynic, but this looks to me like a statement purely for local consumption, designed to diffuse Santos’s false choice of it’s-Santos-or-war, redacted after internal polls may have shown that it would favor his election on the June 15th runoff.